Afpy Camp - Python Sprint Wrap-up

The Afpy Computer Camp was great as usual. We were fifteen of us sprinting at my house and we had a lot of fun watching zombies movies (Shawn of the Dead. Zombie Land) and eating that suckling Pig I bought.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="315" caption="The packaging pig is dead "]image[/caption]

On the coding side I must admit I did not do as much as I wanted, which is a shame since I had around me great folks to work on testing, packaging etc. I had to take care of the catering and the train station shuttling.

I did find some time to brainstorm with Michael on plugins and some code should follow this week. The idea is to provide a entry-point like set of API in the version of pkgutil we have in distutils2, which complements PEP 376 and is supposed to update the module we have in the stdlib. Michael will use it for unittest2 once I ship a working version.

I also did quite some work with Holger, who helped me with is Tox tool to set up a Continuous Integration server for Distutils2 that tests multiple Python version. Yay! Its up and running but I need to add some ACLs before I publish it.

Next we talked about the best approach for people to start using Distutils2 amd Holger came up with great ideas.

We will provide as planned an alpha version that has a run module that can be run to execute distutils2 on a project. No more setup.py here, the script will just read the setup.cfg and read all options from there, including a section where all metadata are described.
$ python -m distutils2.run install

That's already committed and I have one more feature to add before I released Distutils2 1.0a3 : a small hook to allow people to run arbitrary code in the process. This hook won't be able to change the metadata so we don't break the "static metadata" paradigm we want to provide -- see PEP 345 --. It will be useful though to work on build options etc.image

Projects will be able to keep their setup,py file for Distutils1 and Setuptools (that's the new idea :D) , and add sections in their setup.cfg to make the project Distutils2 compatible in the same time. IOW each Distutils version will not step on the other version toes. I am more concerned about the adoption of distutils2 in the various installers like Pip or easy_install but that's a good complement to have.

I had a great time with great folks, thanks to the PSF / Jesse Noller for the $250 grant we are going to use for paying part of the travel expenses for Michael and Holger. Thanks also to Logilab who sent us Pierres-Yves.

I am looking forward to read other people wrap-up, and also to next year Camp !

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